Shadow of the Beast

Genre

Action Adventure

Developer / Publisher

Gremlin Interactive

Released

1990

Media

1 x

Rating

Graphics:

7.0

Sound:

7.0

Gameplay:

8.0

Overall:

7.0

Reviewed by

ndial

Shadow of the Beast, a side-scrolling arcade game, was originally released for the Commodore Amiga computers by Reflections (published by Psygnosis) being one of the most technically advanced games for its time. The game was ported to the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and several 8/16bit video-game consoles.

Review

Shadow of the Beast takes place in a fantasy world where an Evil Lord called Maletoth killed Aabron's (our hero's) father and then cast a spell to the youngster turning him into a wild, strong and ugly beast (Aabron actually looks much like the ancient Greek god, Pan). Now our hero must take his revenge and break the curse gaining back his human nature. He must fight against large enemies, monsters, magician lords, skeletons, traps and finally confront the powerful Maletoth. The journey is tough and Aabron needs each and every drop of energy in order to survive. His only weapons are his bare hands plus some rare tools that he can use on the way. In terms of gameplay Shadow of the Beast is one of the most difficult games ever created for the Amiga so it needs patience and some good skill in order to survive. The game was originally released on the Commodore Amiga computers by Reflections (published by Psygnosis) being one of the most technically advanced games ever released, and ported to the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and several 8/16bit video-game consoles.

Although, Shadow of the Beast (aka Beast) was a state of the art game of its time (especially for the Amiga), the CPC version was the same sort of thing as the ZX Spectrum but just don t ask which out of the two comes out on top. The CPC offers only a few more colors than the ZX. In terms of details the game here resembles as much as possible the original, having nicely drawn sprites and backgrounds. . The game also offers three levels of parallax scrolling (!) which is quite impressive for the CPC hardware (note that, the Commodore 64 version offers more than six-layers here!!!). Scrolling is quite good but limited to CPC's hardware (some slow-downs etc). Collision detection though is great and sprites move fast. Soundwise the CPC version offers most of the original tunes (limited to its sound hardware of course) whilst there are several SFX too during gameplay. Overall the game is quite good in terms of graphics and sound, but cannot compare to the C64 version which plays faster, and offers much better sound.